🛡️ CVE-2023-46836 on Debian — xen

⚪ Unknown ✅ No Known Exploit OSV
N/A
CVSS Score
0 Low4 Medium7 High9 Critical10

Description

The fixes for XSA-422 (Branch Type Confusion) and XSA-434 (Speculative Return Stack Overflow) are not IRQ-safe. It was believed that the mitigations always operated in contexts with IRQs disabled. However, the original XSA-254 fix for Meltdown (XPTI) deliberately left interrupts enabled on two entry paths; one unconditionally, and one conditionally on whether XPTI was active. As BTC/SRSO and Meltdown affect different CPU vendors, the mitigations are not active together by default. Therefore, there is a race condition whereby a malicious PV guest can bypass BTC/SRSO protections and launch a BTC/SRSO attack against Xen.

Distribution advisory

This page covers CVE-2023-46836 as tracked by Debian, for the package xen. The fix is available in version 4.17.2+76-ge1f9cb16e2-1; earlier versions remain affected.

How this vulnerability can be exploited

This issue can be reached with local access to the system, attack complexity is high, an attacker needs low-level privileges on the target. No user interaction is required. The scope is unchanged, so the impact stays within the vulnerable component. Rated impact: confidentiality high, integrity none, availability none.

Affected software

DEBIAN-CVE-2023-46836 is recorded against 1 package.

  • xen (fixed in 4.17.2+76-ge1f9cb16e2-1)

Timeline and source

Published on 5 January 2024 and last revised on 7 August 2026. No public exploit is currently recorded for this entry. Record sourced from OSV.

References

security-tracker.debian.org (Advisory)

CVE-2023-46836 on other distributions

Each distribution ships its own build and its own fixed version. Pick the one you run:

Details

Severity Unknown
CVSS Score N/A
CVSS Vector CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CWE N/A
Public Exploit ✅ No
Source OSV
Published 2024-01-05
Updated 2026-08-12
Modified 2026-08-07
Fix URL N/A

Affected Packages

Software From version Fixed in
xen — 4.17.2+76-ge1f9cb16e2-1

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